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It's all the unions' fault, according to singer-songwriter Roy Zimmerman. The song is an ironic take on blaming unions, and it was filmed at a Colorado site where the Western Federation of Miners battled in the early part of the 20th century.

On March 23, former UB Law Professor Jeffrey Malkan filed a civil rights lawsuit against Law School Dean Makau W. Mutua in the federal District Court of Buffalo. The suit alleges that two months after Mutua became dean in 2008, he illegally fired Malkan by violating Malkan’s right to due process under the 14th Amendment and barring Malkan access to a mandatory faculty review procedure.

Malkan, former director of the law school’s Legal Research and Writing program (LRW), alleges that Mutua failed to follow non-discretionary faculty review procedures required under Malkan’s contract with the school. The lawsuit also names the current vice dean for legal skills, Charles P. Ewing, who allegedly worked in conspiracy with Mutua to block Malkan’s access to a mandatory faculty grievance process, thus allowing Ewing to become director of the LRW soon after Malkan was fired.

Malkan was fired from the law school because Mutua planned on eliminating the LRW program from the school’s curriculum, a position Malkan had maintained since 2000, the lawsuit alleges. In a letter to Malkan informing him of his termination, Mutua said the new Skills Program (created after the LRW’s termination and awarded Ewing) was an appropriate and legal substitution.

Thanks to one of our commenters and also to Rebecca Hamburg of NELA's Employee Rights Advocacy Institute For Law & Policy, we now have the Iowa opinion of Judge Blink in Pippin v. Iowa. Rebecca also reports that NELA is planning its 2012 Fall Seminar around related issues, Bias 2.0: What Every Employee Advocate Should Know. I’m sure she'll let us know when the program is finalized and registration opens.

Friend of the blog, Nancy Levit (UMKC) sends along this call for papers likely of interest to your readers:

Call for Papers Announcement

AALS Section on Women in Legal Education

“Institutional Responsibility for Sex and Gender Exploitation”

2013 AALS Annual Meeting

January 4-7, 2013

New Orleans, Louisiana

The AALS Section on Women in Legal Education will hold a program during the AALS 2013 Annual Meeting in New Orleans, with paper presentations on the topic of Institutional Responsibility for Sex and Gender Exploitation. We have the below committed moderator and speakers, and are seeking paper submissions to fill the fifth speaker slot. The papers will be published as a Symposium in the Iowa Journal of Gender, Race & Justice.

Moderator: Professor Cheryl Wade

Protection for Children in Club Sports (Professor Ellen Bublick)

Theories to Holding Insurance Companies Liable for Third Party Exploitation (Dean Jay Mootz)

Submissions should be of scholarship relating to the topic of Institutional Responsibility for Sex and Gender Exploitation, but they can be on any dimension or strand of the general topic. There is a maximum 25,000 word limit (inclusive of footnotes) for the submission. People submitting papers for consideration must be willing to have the paper published as part of the symposium, if the author is selected as the fifth speaker for the panel. Each professor may submit only one paper for consideration.

Papers will be reviewed anonymously. The manuscript should be accompanied by a cover letter with the author’s name and contact information. The manuscript itself, including title page and footnotes, must not contain any references that identify the author or the author’s school. The submitting author is responsible for taking any steps necessary to redact self-identifying text or footnotes.

To be considered, papers must be submitted electronically to Professor Kirsten Davis, Stetson University College of Law, kkdavis@law.stetson.edu. The deadline for submission is Wednesday, August 1, 2012. The author of the selected paper will be notified by October 1, 2012. The Call for Paper participant will be responsible for paying his or her own annual meeting registration fee and travel expenses.

Full-time faculty members of AALS member law schools are eligible to submit papers. Foreign, visiting (and not full-time on a different faculty), and adjunct faculty members, graduate students, and fellows are not eligible to submit.

Papers will be selected after review by an ad hoc committee composed of Section Executive Committee members.

Any inquiries about the Call for Papers should be submitted to: Professor Kirsten Davis, Stetson University College of Law, kkdavis@law.stetson.edu, or 727-562-7877.

Apparently, the a state trial level judge in Iowa has rejected one of the more overt efforts to deploy implicit bias as a theory of discrimination in a class action. Here's one of the news stories, but I haven't been able to locate the opinion itself. Will post when I do. Hat tip to Katie Eyer.

As for the injunction, it's not a total surprise given the politics now. That said, it didn't seem injunction-worthy to me. The harm to employers of merely posting a notice seems extremely low. And the NLRB, to me, is on very solid footing. As I've noted before, this is a very limited exercise of administrative authority and, under normal rules of administrative law, the NLRB should be in good shape. Of course, as readers are well aware, things related to the NLRB often don't follow the normal rules.

The panel was Tatel, Kavanagh, and Brown. Also, I've heard that my memory may not be correct (no surprise there) and that this panel may not be the same lineup that hears the merits.

One question for readers: does anyone know which judges issued the injunction? Assuming they're the ones who will hear the merits of the case (which, if my memory is correct, is the normal practice in that court), that would be relevant in predicting how this might turn out.

Senate Republicans have indicated that they will file an amicus brief in a case challenging the NLRB's recess appointments. No huge surprise there, although their choice of attorney is somewhat newsworthy, as its Miguel Estrada, the D.C. Circuit nominee filibustered by Democrats a few years ago.

Also, the NLRB has recently issued a formal rejection of the recess appointment challenge in Center for Social Change. The Democratic members rely on the presumption of regularity for public officials' acts; the Republican members rely on the lack of jurisdiction.

More evidence that the NLRB has become a political game in Congress: Rep. Kline, Chair of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, has asked the NLRB's Inspector General to investigate whether Acting General Counsel Solomon made any improper ex parte communications regarding the Boeing case. Kline's own description of his request shows what a stretch this is. He notes that the GC and NLRB aren't supposed to have ex parte discussions the merits of an ongoing case. He then copies a set of emails that suggest that Solomon and Wilma Liebman discussed the Boeing case. However, as he admits, their emails are redacted. Moreover, when looking at the context of the email exchange--it dealt with the NLRB's attempt to get a media organization to correct misinformation in a report, especially with regard to the difference between a complaint filed by the GC as opposed to the organization's statement that "NLRB Rules Against Boeing"--I'd bet a lot of money that Solomon's and Liebman's emails had absolutely nothing to do with the merits of the case. Not that it matters;this is probably more harassment than anything else, especially in response to the Flynn investigation. Speaking of which, I haven't seen Kline express much concern about those emails . . . .